Working parents juggle so much during the day, from managing pressures at work to organising a multitude of family responsibilities.
Apps to make life easier for busy caregivers have mushroomed on the market, and while some weren’t originally designed with parents in mind, they’ve been adopted wholeheartedly as ways to more easily navigate daily life.
Below are seven apps to help parents who are under pressure
1. Manage family tasks
OurHome offers a simple way to co-ordinate chores, and turn the doing of them into a game. Family members can create to-do lists and assign tasks to each other. Adults can award points to tasks, with kids able to exchange those points for rewards.
2. Healthy eating made easy
Mealtime can customise weekly meal plans with delicious dishes to suit any family’s tastes and lifestyle. Simply enter food preferences and any dietary restrictions, then select the week’s meals from any of the recipes that the app curates.
The app also automatically generates a shopping list with the ingredients needed for that week’s dishes. The recipes can be cooked in 30 minutes or less and the app is so smart that it has an automatic meal planner to combine recipes to use up any leftovers.
3. Meditation and mindfulness
Headspace offers hundreds of meditations of varying lengths for users to choose from. The app has features that will set reminders, track the user’s progress and download some of the sessions to experience off-line.
Other perks include sleep casts to induce restful sleep, calming music playlists and child friendly content.
4. Find a great electrician, plumber or handyman fast
SweepSouth’s Connect app takes the hassle out of finding a reputable handyman, plumber, electrician or painter by connecting the user to nearby vetted and rated professionals.
Once the service has been selected, a chat feature allows the user to talk to the service provider directly. The app also has an image recognition feature, which lets the user take a picture of a household area or broken item so that it can identify which service professional is best suited to help fix the problem.
5. Keep your focus in a busy environment
A Soft Murmur offers a simple, yet effective solution, with various ambient noises to drown out distractions and help moms focus. They can choose from a selection of sounds found in nature, such as the soft patter of rain or the easy sweep of the wind, each softly soothing, and overlay them for hypnotically comforting effect.
6. Making charity easy
The MySchool MyVillage MyPlanet app lets users “swipe” their virtual card when doing purchases in-store and online, and have a portion of their spend go to the cause of their choice – at no extra cost.
7. Eating out, for everyone
Being a vegetarian or going vegan is fast becoming a life choice for many, including teens. Enter Happy Cow, an app with listings not only of vegetarian or vegan restaurants in an area, but any establishment with vegan or vegetarian offerings, such as an ice-cream shop with vegan flavours.
Each venue has a description of what’s on offer and user reviews. Users can also join a community of like-minded people worldwide, sift through delicious recipes posted by users and find loads of information on topics.
IOL TECH